Marguerite Porete and the Seven States by John Noyce

 Marguerite Porete and the Seven States 

John Noyce

For the mystic, and possible Beguine, Marguerite Porette there was nowhere to hide once her book, the Mirouer des simples ames (Mirror of simple souls), began to circulate. Or perhaps she did not want to hide in a convent. Little is known about her. In the early 1300s she was living in the area around Valencienne, now part of the Hainaut province of Belgium. Sometime before 1306 her book had been condemned by the bishop of Cambrai and publicly burnt. Marguerite then revised and extended her text, and this was approved by three (male) theologians. But there were powerful forces of intolerance at work in French society at that time, and in 1310 extracts from Mirouer were judged to be heretical. This led to Marguerite being burnt at the stake in Paris.  The Mirouer survived as an anonymous work, only being reattributed to Marguerite in the mid-twentieth century.  

The seven states (stages)

The book outlines the seven states through which the Soul reaches God. Chapter 118 begins: 

“I have promised, says this Soul, ever since Love has overpowered me, to say something about the seven stages we call states, for so they are. And these are the degrees by which one ascends from the valley to the height of the mountain, which is so isolated that one sees nothing save God. Each degree of being has its own level.”

In the first state the Soul is touched by Grace and stripped of her power to sin. She feels she has a full time job keeping the commandments to love God with all her heart, and love her neighbor as herself. 

In the second state the Soul “considers that God counsels His special lovers to go beyond what He

commands.” She abandons possessions, mortifies nature, and despises riches, delights and honours, so that she can “accomplish the perfection of the evangelical counsel of which Jesus Christ is the exemplar.”

In the third state the Soul has to conquer her will and love the work of perfection by which “her spirit is sharpened through a boiling desire of Love in multiplying in herself such works.” Thus “it is necessary to be pulverized in breaking and bruising the self in order to enlarge the place where love would want to be.”

In the fourth state the Soul is “drawn by the height of love into the delight of thought through meditation.” Here she believes that there is no higher life, but Marguerite points out that the Soul is deceived and that there are two further stages which are given by God and which are greater and nobler and that these can be obtained by what she calls Fine Love.

The fifth stage is the stage of Nothingness. Here the Soul realizes that apart from God she is nothing: “Now such a Soul is nothing, for she sees her nothingness by means of the abundance of Divine Understanding, which maker her nothing and places her in nothingness. And so she is all things, for she sees by means of the depth of understanding of her own wretchedness, which is so deep and so great that she finds there neither beginning nor middle nor end, only a bottomless abyss. There she finds herself, without finding and without bottom. One does not find oneself who cannot attain this.”

The Mirror of Simple Souls

The sixth stage is one of clarification. The Soul now knows where it stands. Once it reaches the sixth stage it is safe. It can return to the fifth stage,  but is not in danger of falling to the fourth or lower. So now Divine Love and the Soul now work together to put an end to reason, and the Soul becomes a Divine Mirror:  “… God sees Himself in her by His divine majesty, who clarifies this Soul with Himself, so that she sees only that there is nothing except God Himself who is, from who all things are.” And so “The Soul is at the sixth stage, freed and pure and clarified from all things – but not at all glorified.”

The seventh stage is that of glorification. Here “Love keeps within herself in order to give it to us in eternal glory, of which we will have no understanding until our soul has left our body.”

Anonymous circulation and eventual rediscovery

In the decades following Marguerite’s condemnation the Mirouer continued to be regarded as suspect by church authorities. But it was to become widely circulated throughout Europe in Latin and in numerous translations as the work of an anonymous Carthusian monk. Ascribed to an anonymous male member of a conservative religious order, the book was acceptable, even admired; written by a lay woman it was deeply suspect. And so the situation continued until the mid-twentieth century when the Italian historian Romana Guarnieri established Marguerite’s authorship in an article published in 1946.  Guarnieri continued to work on this text, publishing the first critical edition of the Old French text in 1965, and the full critical edition of the Old French and Latin with Middle English notes in 1986. Whilst an English translation had been published in 1927, this was before Marguerite’s authorship had been established. In 1993 an English translation by Ellen Babinsky was published, and since then this text has continued to be critically studied and acknowledged as a masterpiece of women’s spiritual writing.

Several modern scholars have observed similarities between Marguerite’s Mirouer and the writings of Meister Eckhart, with similar phrasing to be found in both. Eckhart arrived in Paris in the year after Marguerite’s death, and he is known to have shared a house at this time with a member of the Inquisition that had tried and condemned her. 

Although there is no direct evidence, it seems likely that Eckhart had access to the text of the Mirouer. Most of his surviving sermons are from the later period of his life, from 1310 to his death, c.1328. Clearly Eckhart was influenced by Marguerite’s ideas, although his own condemnation for heresy was to be posthumous (in 1329). 

Extract from John Noyce, The Inner Ascent (lulu books, 2018)
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/sahajhist/